In My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), Julia Roberts played Julianne Potter, a food critic who realises, just days before her best friend Michael’s wedding, that she is in love with him. Directed by P. J. Hogan, the film follows Julianne as she tries, with comic desperation, to break up the wedding to Kimberly, played by Cameron Diaz, and win Michael, played by Dermot Mulroney, for herself.
What made the role a signature was that Roberts played a heroine who was not always likeable. Julianne is witty, charming and selfish in equal measure, and Roberts kept the audience on her side even when her schemes went too far. The film’s famous singalong to ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ and its bittersweet ending, in which Julianne accepts that she has lost, showed her gift for romantic comedy with a grown-up ache underneath.
My Best Friend’s Wedding was a major hit and remains one of Roberts’ most loved nineties performances, a reminder that she could make even a flawed romantic lead feel warm, funny and human.